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(Photo credit: Mrs. Gemstone)

I am always fascinated by the way Republican politicians cannot get through a speech without extolling the ‘great spirit of America’, while completely failing to recognize that the great spirit they speak of is not the sole and exclusive province of the white conservatives and evangelicals who form the vaunted base of their party.

This lack of recognition, when it comes to our minority communities, is one of the great blind spots of those who identify with the GOP—a blind spot that is not unlike the many (not all) pro-life folks who will support all sorts of radical behavior to save the life of an unborn child and then completely lose all interest in whether that child lives or dies once he or she has safely landed on terra firma.

But if the GOP didn’t get it before, even the most resistant among them must now understand what so many others have known all along —America’s minority communities very much possess the great American spirit.

And they are not afraid to use it.

If you doubt this, continue trying every trick in the book to keep these people from voting. Try passing more voter ID laws, just months before a national election, designed to make it more difficult for members of minority communities to achieve proper identification so that they might cast their vote. Carry on clamping down on early voting opportunities knowing full well that minority communities have a long history of turning out early to vote their preferences. Keep on shutting down the polls on the weekend preceding an important election knowing full well that there is a tradition in the Black community of voting after Sunday church.

Try all of this and more and do you know what will happen?

America’s minority communities will continue to show up at the polls in massive numbers and cast their vote—even when it means waiting up to 9 hours in the rain to accomplish the job—because that is precisely what they did this past Tuesday.

They will do this not only because they understand the profound importance of fulfilling this critical obligation of American citizenship. They will do this so that all will know that nobody is going to take back this hard-won, precious right that so many fought—and some died—to achieve.

Despite efforts in 33 GOP controlled states to restrict the vote, exit polls reveal that the minority share of the 2012 electorate increased from 26 percent in 2008 to 28 percent in 2012. Voting among the African-American community remained steady at 13 percent of the total electorate.

Indeed, it was this increased participation by our minority communities provided their candidate, President Barack Obama, with the votes he needed to accomplish his margin of victory.

For those who seek to win elections the old fashioned way—by denying the vote to those more likely to support your opponent—you might want to take a shot at getting your arms around what 75 year old Yancy Jones of Inglewood, California, a man strugging with the debilitating effects of a recent stroke, had to say in an interview published in the The Daily Beast:

"This entire campaign has just made me so upset with this country that I thought had come further along,” Jones said slowly. “Some of the same things my parents fought against and I fought against were back into play, like the right to vote. There was no way I could let that happen, so I had to come and vote for Obama whether I felt good health-wise or not."

That, my friends, is the very personification of the great American spirit that our Republican friends are so quick to claim as their own.

What should now be clear to even the most ignorant and regressive of state legislators and billionaire businessmen is that there is nothing they can throw at these people that is going to dissuade them from exercising their constitutionally protected right to vote. This will continue to be the case whether the effort to deny them emanates from the office of a governor in Florida, the Secretary of State in Ohio, a Republican controlled legislative body in Pennsylvania or the headquarters of a Kansas based energy company controlled by two brothers who may understand a few things about making big money but haven’t a clue as to what the American spirit is really all about.

So to those of you who continue to think that suppressing the vote is the way to victory, keep it up. The harder you work at playing dirty, the more the nation’s minorities will fight back where and when it counts the most—

By showing up to vote.

contact Rick at thepolicypage@gmail.com and follow me on Twitter @rickungar